Welcome to REID’S READER, a site renewed fortnightly and devoted to the appreciation and discussion of books old and new by bibliophile, critic and reviewer Nicholas Reid. Each week REID’S READER offers Something New, Something Old and Something Thoughtful to readers and browsers. REID’S READER will sometimes feature guest reviewers and will sometimes offer general book news, but it does not run publishers’ publicity material.
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Monday, June 2, 2014

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

I’m going to begin this review
like Dumb Dora, stripping the fat and flesh off the skeleton and leaving only
the bones. In other words, I’ll give you the “plot”.

Tim Wilson’s News Pigs is about a low-level print journalist, Tom Milde, from a
small and parochially-minded country, who wakes up with one hell of a hangover
in New York, is broke, is disoriented and yet by a sheer fluke gets an offer to
cover for TV the latest US college shooting massacre, which is still in
progress. So down South hapless, bedragged, incompetent, out-of-his-depth Tom
Milde hies himself and mixes with the TV journos and frontpersons; and tries to
do the job of to-camera reporting; and bumbles and flummoxes and has
near-misses and dodges some bullets; and makes a sometime fool of himself; and
engenders many pratfalls (well, he is a prat, after all) and much loud farce.

There now. See how useless
telling you the “plot” of a novel is? Because this is approximately as helpful
as saying that Ulysses is about two
guys wandering around Dublin and eventually bumping into each other late at
night. The “plot” doesn’t give you the flavour of the book, or what it is doing
stylistically. 90% of the impact of News
Dogs comes from Tim Wilson’s rollercoastering use of language, a classic
case of “it ain’t what you say but the way that you say it.”

Allow me to quote the novel’s
very opening words to see what part of the sea coast of Bohemia we are walking
on. News Pigs beginneth thus:

“Excuse
us, dear reader, for we begin rather than end – as is traditional for
journalist hymns – with The King of All Hangovers!

Blame this tale’s topsy-turvy moment, a bejewelled gangrenous era now
slipping from anecdote into myth.

Blame Our Hero’s milieu: the scribbling classes: part newshound, part
boozehound, all zeitgeist.

Blame New York City, for she is both mother and whore.

Phooey, let’s just save time, and blame his drunken, oversleeping @$$.

Ah! Now you understand, don’t
you? Tim Wilson is quite consciously and deliberately pushing himself as author
to the fore, warning us from the get-go that he will be appearing in this
novel, providing direct commentary, directly addressing us, daring us to get,
or not to get, all the current and often ephemeral cultural references that
will be thrust at us and using a vocabulary now erudite and now downright
demotic. And might I say, dear reader, that in the process Tim Wilson confirms
what I have long believed? There is only a hair’s breadth of difference between
modernist novels which break the fourth wall and go all self-referential; and
19th century novels which directly addressed their readers. Hence, I
guess, this mocking use of ye olde “dear reader” and “Our Hero”.

Now get how Wilson describes the
small and parochially-minded country from which dithering Tom Milde comes. It
is habitually referred to as the PLC, which is explained in one of the (not-infrequent)
footnotes as “The Plucky Little Country,
pop.3.8 million: Milde’s motherland: social laboratory and cheese larder
(particularly Gouda); widely admired for the nobility and humility of her
inhabitants, her beautiful weather, and her dominance in the sport of curling.”
(p.11)

In other words, it is New Zealand
in the most transparent of drag, with curling replacing rugby and Our Hero as
Milde as the mild cheddar produced therein.

More to the thematic point, the
PLC just happens to have two rival TV companies. There’s Erewhon TV, whose
screeching and frantic producer Rita Hurrikin recruits Milde. It is described
as “The PLC’s second-string network: a
yapping cur, journalistically it’s true; not to be confused with the powerful
and widely respected His Majesty’s Royal PLC TV” (footnote p. 46). In other
words, it is TV3 and its affiliates up against the mighty TVNZ. And in this
novel the HMR PLC TV (i.e.TVNZ) network has a seasoned frontman grandiosely
called Samson Agonistes (oh self-dramatiser!) up against Erewhon TV’s (i.e.
TV3’s) amateur dork Tom Milde.

Ah, dear bibliophiliac reader,
did you hear a faint echo of a long-ago novel about another incompetent twit
thrust into the frantic part of the journalist game? Yes!! Poor flapping
nature-writer William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1938). Surely Tim Wilson has read it??? No satirist of the
media can do without it etc. etc. And as you read News Pigs, did you see, in drag, equivalents of the New Zealand Herald and the Listener and Metro? I think I did.

But enough, enough of this
feather-footed-through-the-plashy-fen exposition of mine. What I want you to understand clearly is that
Tim Wilson can draw curlicues and do handstands with language and pun twenty-to-the
minute. Did he coin the term “autohagiographical”
(p.44) for works in which journalists talk themselves up? If he did, then a big
fat Bravo to him. And may I compliment him on giving the name Xenanakakakis to
the Greek sage whose book Milde has souvenired, for clearly the Greek sage is a
postmodernist twit, and therefore both a nana
and a purveyor of ka-ka (= poo-poos =
shit). Also, there is the omniscient, omni-commentating author’s chirpy
confession of faith in our endurance: “You
think it’s hard to write like an adult? Sometimes, sweet reader, it’s even
harder to read like one. We salute you.” (p.141)

It is great fun to rollick and
romp in this novel’s linguistic games, and enjoy the joke of having big black
spaces on the page where drunken Tom Milde’s memory fails him. It is fun to see
bitchy, fashionable, promiscuous NY gallery-attenders and hangers-on skilfully
trashed. It is also arresting, in the midst of the verbal pyrotechnics, to have
Tim Wilson draw us up short with hard statements about America such as “In its
heart, America is sullen, brooding, and terrible. No wonder people fled to the
extremities, to cities, light and clamour.” (p.99)

But surely the main business on
hand is to assess Wilson’s implied attitude towards the news media, is it not?
Is this straight satire on television news, or is it more complex than that? In
the corner of straight satire, let me quote as evidence Wilson’s skewering of
the agendas brought by, and stereotypes engendered by, the international TV
news crews as they descend on the site of the US college massacre:

Then there is the French
correspondent called Plongeur (= Plonker?), who explains that those over whom
Milde has to tumble to get to the scene of the massacre are “News Pigs. The grunting of the news pigs.
Always worried. Always hungry. Today, massacre. Tomorrow, hurricane….”
(p.121)

And yet, and yet, and yet…. as we
hoot at the satire, we remember that the talented Tim Wilson was TVNZ’s
frontman in the USA for the best part of a decade and is (unless my information
is grossly out-of-date) still employed in a behind-the-camera capacity by TVNZ.
This is not a man who hates TV news and all its implications, surely? Is his tone
more love-hate? He is more scornful than endorsing of sensationalist bulletins
and rightly shows us how much “news” is sheer “construction”, yet (via
self-evidently ridiculous quotations from that postmodernist plonker
Xenanakakakis) he also warns that there is such a thing as objective reality,
however much academic theory may ignore it, and that it does have to be
reported upon. Perhaps, indeed, parts of the novel are a sly celebration of the
fierce rivalry of channels to get a scoop, no matter how undignified may be
their means of getting it.

Or should I interpret the whole
novel in another way? Let’s consider it in the sequence of Tim Wilson’s
published work to date. First there was Wilsons’s novel Their Faces Were Shining about some people’s idea of salvation.
Call that Wilson’s Paradiso. Then
came his collection of short stories The
Desolation Angel in which Wilson’s characters struggled hard through sin
and failure. Call that his Purgatorio.
So could News Pigs be his Inferno? This means he’s written The Divine Comedy in reverse. “Milde must find his place in this Boschian
nightmare” it says on page 120. Yes, news-feeds are a vision of Hell. It is
Tim Wilson’s Inferno.

By the way, did I also happen to
mention that it’s bloody funny?

I’m always forgetting the
freaking obvious.

* *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *

If Dylan Horrocks reads this (you
never know – it could happen), then I’d like to apologize to him and to all
cartoonists. Not for anything I’ve done or said in print, but for an attitude
I’ve long harboured.

You see, I’ve never been an enemy
of comics. I was brought up by a father who took out subscriptions for his kids
to English comics like Dandy and Beano and the awfully decent Eagle, and I enjoyed the likes of
Desperate Dan and Dan Dare. I also enjoyed the Mad magazine paperbacks he had on his shelves and Pogo Possum and L’il Abner. When I was a teenager, I enjoyed the value-for-money of
those fat, square-bound Superman
comics, always black-and-white and good for long train journeys. There was the
whole other world of Tintin, supreme
adventure stories for boys and still books much revisited by me. And the
fun-and-games of Asterix. And then,
in student years, there were student mag reprints of the likes of that weirdo
Robert Crumb.

BUT, no matter how much people
thrust things like Maus at me, I
never could or would catch on to the idea of comics as adult works. If anybody
used the term “graphic novel” in my presence, I would harrumph that it was
merely a “comic book” and insist that it be so called.

So all the way through reading
Dylan Horrocks’ Incomplete Works I
found myself revising my ideas. Not only is this good stuff but it is good grown-up
stuff… except when Horrocks deliberately chooses to draw in a childlike
style, for satirical effect, as he does in the strip “Siso” which looks as
innocent as Rupert the Bear at first but which turns out to have teeth.

These are Incomplete Works because they are just a
selection of Horrocks’ work for the last 25 years, and besides, Horrocks is not
an old man and he still has much work ahead of him.

So many of the early works are
about the younger cartoonist’s self-doubt, self-consciousness and difficulties
in trying to make a living as a cartoonist. You can find all this in the 26
puzzling and melancholy pages of the “Pickle” sequence drawn and written in
1990. When you get to the “Western Wind” sequence, there is the imagery of an
Eastern country (Arabia? Egypt?) yet the story is one of longing for a beloved
one, universal in its implications.

When Horrocks moves (or moved?)
out of the autobiographical strips, he can enjoy himself denting national
pieties, as in his “Captain Cook’s Comic Cuts”, where the revered navigator
turns out to be a closet cartoonist. He also experiments, as in the Holocaust
story “There Are No Words in My Mouth”, which has blank speech bubbles.

What I find most interesting, and
one of Horrock’s most endearing traits, is his awareness of a tradition in
comics. This collection includes strips in honour of Krazy Kat’s creator George
Herriman, in honour of Winsor McKay, who invented the first regular newspaper
strip cartoon, and in honour of the New Zealand cartoonist Barry Linton. I mean
this is a cartoonist who admires his peers and forebears, and is happy to show
how much he has learned from them.

Okay, I’m not saying that
everything in this volume appealed to me. Because I am still highly allergic to
dice-throwing, role-playing fantasy games, I simply did not connect with the
sequence “The Physics Engine”, though I do know some people (such as one of my
sons-in-law) who would absolutely revel in it.

There’s an obvious thing to say
which I should add – Dylan Horrocks is very versatile, and can draw in many
different styles. Incomplete Works is
a virtuosos portfolio.

2 comments:

Read, and appreciated. Thank you, sir! Also: sounds like you had a very fine comics education indeed. No need to apologise; although, if you insist, an appropriate penance could be to read at least three "grown-up" graphic novels. May I suggest Alison Bechdel's 'Fun Home,' David B's 'Epileptic' and Joe Sacco's 'Footsteps in Gaza'? (Although technically all three are non-fiction). Of course, if you haven't read 'Maus,' then you really must.

Actually, Dylan, I was overstating my ignorance, as I have read a few graphic novels [and how could I forget my extensive childhood education in "Classics Illustrated"!]; but I never quite got the hang of them. Anyway, I'm glad you liked the review, inadequate though it was. Scariest graphic novel I read (you probably remember the title - I don't) was the one about the little girl who blackmails a janitor.